After first debuting a collaboration with San Jose Taiko at Subzero Festival in 2010, the Bangerz is working with the traditional Asian drumming performance group again for a joint performance in San Jose.

For the show schedule June 15 at the Montgomery Theater, the two groups want to expand on the original idea introduced at the Subzero Festival.

“I think a lot of people came out of curiosity, but it was kind of like the chocolate and peanut butter effect. It was an epic night,” says Bangerz DJ Aaron “Squareweezy” Aquino.

As of now, the show is mostly finished and will run approximately an hour and twenty minutes with new material.

“We thought it would be cool to merge forces one more time and extend on what we did,” Aquino says. “It will touch on San Jose Taiko’s 40th anniversary and It’s also going to the Bangerz’ 15 year anniversary.”

The plan is to do one show and potentially expand, depending on interest.

“A lot of our music is electronic, 808 drums and hard-hitting synths,” Aquino says. “I think it hits a different note in people when you hear those loud Taiko drums [and see] their choreography combined with the drums, both visually and sonically.”

A Kickstarter campaign, running through May 27, was launched to help offset production costs.

Sometimes Aaron Aquino can’t believe what passes for a live show from beatmakers. If it’s some guy fiddling half-heartedly behind a laptop for the whole set, the man better known by his DJ handle Squareweezy is not impressed.

“Is he checking his email, or performing for us?” Aquino says he has to ask himself.

Though he’s best known as part of the tight-knit San Jose crew the Bangerz, Aquino’s been mixing it up lately with quite a few solo gigs. And forget hiding behind a laptop, you’re just as likely to find him writhing on the edge of the stage, wrestling with some bizarre electrical instrument he’s pulled out of his bag of tricks.

Expect the same energy when Squareweezy performs at the Pagoda Thursday, as part of a “Night of Live Beat Performance” that will also feature B-Dot, Professor Panson, Sesshins and Dranal.

For Aquino, it’s all a lead up to the release of his upcoming EP, which he tentatively plans to drop in September.

“They’ve been constantly evolving,” he says of The Weezmatic EP’s bass-heavy songs. He’ll be playing several of the new tracks at the Pagoda show, and even those who’ve heard their earlier incarnations live are likely to be surprised.

As for the live sets, he just likes to practice what he preaches. “When I play, I can’t help myself. I try to bring the art of performance to the show,” he says. “When my name is on the bill, I want to keep it unpredictable.”

SQUAREWEEZY performs an 18-and-over show at the Pagoda in San Jose on Thursday, July 19, 9pm; $5.

If a day filled with 25 different food trucks, each offering completely different variations of tacos doesn’t already sound like an excellent way to spend a Saturday afternoon, how about adding to that a full day of cutting-edge, eclectic bands?

The organizers of the San Jose Taco Festival made a concerted effort to book some interesting, up-and-coming bands for what they are hoping will be an annual festival in San Jose. They didn’t want the typical classic rock/cover bands that tend to serve as background music to most food-themed festivals. They wanted the kind of lineup people would check out even if there were no tacos.

“We wanted to book bands that were on the cusp of technology, but also bands that are more organic, really get a mixture of both worlds,” says music organizer Matt Gonzales.

At one end of the spectrum, they’ve booked acts like Turbo Sonidero Futuristico, who mix experimental electronic music with traditional cumbia, and Squareweezy, one of the DJs from San Jose’s innovative hip hop crew, The Bangerz.

On the other end, they’ve booked the Tumbleweed Wanderers, an acoustic Americana group with heartland rock and roll passion, and Los Hot Boxers and a local reggae, dancehall group with earnest doo wop elements.

While the bookings were deliberately diverse, they did want to make sure Latin music was represented. Besides Turbo Sonidero Futuristico, La Misa Negra plays strictly traditional cumbia, with a full horn section and lots of danceable percussion to work off those taco calories.

Probably the oddest nod to Mexican music at the festival will be the air accordion festival.

“They originally wanted to do an air guitar contest, but everyone does that, so they came up with an air accordion contest instead,” Gonzales says.

The Taco Festival will be held Saturday, April 14, at History Park, 1650 Senter Rd, San Jose, 11am-5pm; $7. More info.

SoCal producer prodigy Dibiase remembers when L.A. became a beat mecca in 2005. Flipping his own first beats as a teenager growing up in Watts, he wasn’t too long out of high school when he started getting invited to events like Sketchbook, the weekly Tuesday night gathering of up-and-coming talent at the Little Temple club in Silver Lake. At this point, no one knew how huge the scene was going to get, and the early efforts of the West Coast’s best new beatmakers were blasting out every week through the speakers of Dibiase’s boombox.

“I would bring it to Sketchbook every week, and everybody would bring their beat tapes or CDs,” he remembers. “I’d pass the boombox around outside like a round table, and everybody’d play what they made that week. Some people might have made 12 beats, some people might have made 5. But the people who were playing their beats were like Fly Lo, Ras G, a lot of the cats killing it. Georgia Ann Muldrow, she would play stuff there. Sacred, Taarach, pretty much everybody that was in the scene.”

Now, as Dibiase (pronounced Dee-bee-ah-see) makes only his second visit ever to San Jose this week to guest at 2012’s first Treatment night at Johnny V’s, he’s still processing how much things have changed since then. After winning more than 20 beat battles around Los Angeles, he made his name once and for all winning the Red Bull Big Tune Battle in 2010. That same year, he released his first album with one of the hottest labels around for indie hip-hop and electro, Alpha Pup Records. Machines Hate Me, while not his most mind-bending record, was a good introduction to Dibiase’s obsessions for the world at large. Dense, ingeniously sample-heavy and influenced by everything from J Dilla’s MPC work to chiptune video-game music, it’s a natural progression for a producer who started out in junior high chopping up records with nothing but an 8-second sampler and a drum machine to make his beats.

“Stuff that I did in the beginning, a lot of that was trial and error,” he says. “That ended up becoming a sound that people like now. I used to distort a lot of sounds, do a lot of low-fi sounding stuff by default. People were like ‘Man, you need to clean that up.’ Now that sound is popular, that low-fi sound. Now they make equipment and software to do the stuff I was doing by default.”

As time went on, he started trolling pawn shops for whatever equipment he could afford. An MPC cost $2000, and he never thought he’d be able to buy one. But after he got a job, his family secured the credit and he made the payments. Still, his unpredictable style didn’t change.

“The eight second samplers, there were a lot of limits. It forced you to be creative. So once I got on the MPC, I felt like I advanced a lot, but I still tried to have the approach like I was limited. Cause once you feel like you can do anything, you’re too comfortable, you get lazy with stuff.”

Now his deft touch with technology is one of his signatures. “I like to mess with a lot of different equipment, software and hardware. Every piece of equipment, I try to have a different sound on it. Still keep my signature sound, but try to create a different identity with each. You learn new tricks, and that helps you evolve,” he says.

A classic example of his style is his beat for U-N-I’s single “Beautiful Day.” But the story behind it is even more revealing of Dibiase’s obsessive, never-throw-away-anything process. It turns out the beat to the song was just one of dozens he had once been selling online for $50 each. He met U-N-I when filling in as a DJ at a friend’s show, and when they expressed interest in his work, he remembered that one beat sitting unused in a gigantic file somewhere.

“They came through to the crib like two days later, and I played ‘em that ‘Beautiful Day’ beat from that $50 batch,” he says. “And the rest is history. I remember Y-O came up with the hook right on the spot as he was listening to it. Now it’s got like a million views. Somebody could have had that for 50 dollars.”

Dibiase will guest this Thursday, Feb. 2, at Treatment, the DJ night at Johnny V’s that features resident turntablists Squareweezy, Dandiggety, Joob, Wish1, Professor Panson, B.Lewis, Insightful, Shea Butter and R-Cade. 10pm; free.